ALI (Matthias Schoenaerts) finds himself with a five-year-old child on his hands. SAM (Armand Verdure) is his son, but he hardly knows him. Homeless, penniless and friendless, Ali takes refuge with his sister ANNA (Corinne Masiero) in Antibes, in the south of France. There things improve immediately. She puts them up in her garage, she takes the child under her wing and the weather is glorious.

Ali, a man of formidable size and strength, gets a job as a bouncer in a nightclub. He comes to the aid of STEPHANIE (Marion Cotillard) during a nightclub brawl. Aloof and beautiful, Stephanie seems unattainable, but in his frank manner Ali leaves her his phone number anyway.

Stephanie trains orca whales at Marineland. When a performance ends in tragedy, a call in the night again brings them together.
When Ali sees her next, Stephanie is confined to a wheel chair : she has lost her legs and quite a few illusions.

Ali's direct, unpitying physicality becomes Stephanie's lifeline, but Ali too is transformed by Stephanie's tough resilience.And Stephanie comes alive again. As their stories intersect and diverge, they navigate a world where strength, beauty, youth and blood are commodities-but where trust, truth, loyalty and love cannot be bought and sold, and courage comes in many forms.

In Craig Davidson’s gripping short story collection Rust and Bone, individual lives and destinies are blown out of proportion, intensified by drama and accident. The stories depict a harsh modern world where fighting is the way the physical self finds its place and escapes its fate.
Ali and Stéphanie, our two characters, do not appear in the short stories; we took ideas from Craig Davidson’s stories as a point of departure and wove them into a new story. Davidson’s collection already seems to belong to the prehistory of the project, but the power and brutality of our tale, our desire to use drama, indeed melodrama, to magnify our characters all have their immediate source in those stories.

From the very beginning of our adaptation, we were focused on a kind of cinematography that, for want of a better word, we called ‘expressionist.’ We wanted the power of stark, brutal, clashing images in order to further the melodrama. We had in mind an echo of the Great Depression. We thought of old amateur county-fair films, of the dark reality in those surreal visuals.

It is that kind of aesthetic that constantly guided us as we worked on the screenplay. It’s pitiless, yet it sustains a love story that is the true hero of the film. It shows the world though the eyes of a confused child. It underscores the nobleness of our characters in a world made violent by economic disaster. And it respects Ali and Stéphanie’s stubborn attempts to transcend their condition.

- Jacques Audiard and Thomas Bidegain

Seeing It On The Screen

Author Craig Davidson on Rust and Bone

An excerpt from author Craig Davidson’s article Seeing it on the screen about Jacques Audiard’s transformative take on his short-story collection:
It all started when I knocked a glass of water on to a film director’s hat.
A lovely chapeau. Brushed felt. The director was French; his name was Jacques Audiard. The hat was kind of his trademark. I’d been sitting in La Rotonde, a swanky Parisian café; in attendance were Audiard, my French editor Francis Geffard, and me, the clumsy foreign clown — or as the French might say, le bozo.
Audiard had read my story collection, Rust and Bone. He wanted to option it and I wanted to let him. He was especially taken with two stories: “27 Bones,” concerning a once-promising amateur boxer whose life devolves into a series of underground bare-knuckle fights; and “Rocket Ride,” a story about a killer whale trainer who gets his leg torn off by an aggrieved orca.
Jacques’ notion was to braid these stories together, align the main characters by connecting their physical weaknesses — the boxer has brittle hands that keep breaking; the trainer has no leg — to the way their lives unfold afterwards. It was a connection that, to be honest, I’d not seen while writing it. I found it thrilling that he’d found an inroad I’d never glimpsed.
But our discussion of such complex emotional terrain was made difficult by the fact my French stinks and Audiard’s English was marginally better. Mostly, Francis and Jacques spoke. I drank beer too fast and tried to look suave and then I knocked Jacques’ eau de gaz on to his exquisite hat and the meeting ended, as meetings tend to when one party makes a roaring buffoon of himself.
He did option the book, however. The option money spent well, as money tends to. I never expected much else. Oh, I’d heard the stats: less than 5% of literary properties make it to the screen, et cetera et cetera. But the production company renewed the option. Next: rumours a script had been written. Stars had been attached. Marion Cotillard — really?
Still, I never quite believed. I figured it’d fall apart somehow. But one thing flowed into the next and then one day I was watching the trailer and thinking: Huh, I guess they really made it.
Some people will want to know: How does it feel to have a film made out of something you wrote?
The answer is: pretty darn good! I’ve been fantastically fortunate. I’m not
9
worried it’ll be as good as my book — I know for a fact it’ll be better. I wrote it when I was in my 20s. I was a ballsy writer. That’s what drew Jacques to it: the action, the frenetic-ness of it, the fact that I write in fully-formed scenes that unravel like a movie — a tribute to how much films have shaped my writing style. But the book also reflects a youthful viewpoint that misses much of the variance and beauty of life that are so clear to me now.
People have asked how it feels to have my book reworked and fitted to the screen — did it bother me that someone was monkeying around with my stories? They wondered if I considered flying to France, stalking around the set shaking my fist screaming: “This isn’t my VISION! You’re perverting it all!”
The thought never crossed my mind. My investment in the film has been minimal: I simply provided the seed. Yes, there have been plot and character changes: the male protagonist of “Rocket Ride” becomes Marion Cotillard, for example (and I’m weirdly OK with that!).
But as I said, the film will outshine the book. Having read the script, I can tell you Audiard has elevated it to something I simply wasn’t capable of expressing back when I wrote it. The man is at the height of his powers. Me? Hopefully I’m just warming up. Jacques found such wonderful connections, sharpened the characters and gave the film something I struggle with: a deep romantic context. It’s a love story, albeit a tortured one. He’s taken what the book gave him and shaped it into a deeper resonance.
I’ll get a DVD screener and sit down with my folks, my girlfriend and my brother and a few close friends. We’ll order a pizza, crack a case of beer and watch that sucker. And it’ll matter deeply to me that I watch it with just those people, as they’re the ones who were with me before it was even a possibility — supporting my foolish endeavour to be a writer without any inkling that something this cool might ever come of it.

Just as the principal characters Stéphanie and Ali are transformed in Rust and Bone, so the film’s director and lead actors went through a discovery process together that was not always easy or predictable.

“When I read the script, I loved Stéphanie right away, but I have to say that I didn’t really understand her,” recalls Marion Cotillard, who stars as the orca trainer who loses her legs. “I was a bit freaked out to confess that to Jacques, and he said, ‘Well you know, it’s the same for me. I don’t know who she is and we’re going to have to take the road together and find her and give her life.’ That was very exciting for me. At the end, there’s still some mystery about Stéphanie.”

That sense of diving headlong into the unexpected touches every aspect of Rust and Bone. “What we were trying to do, with the writing, filming, actors’ performances, editing, music,” says director Jacques Audiard, “was to combine an almost naturalistic realism with its opposite—melodrama, surreal imagery, a heightened experience.” So when Cotillard worried about how to act out Stéphanie’s trauma, Audiard saw her uncertainty as a plus: “Jacques said: ‘That’s the story of the movie: there’s this girl and—bam!—she has no legs! It’s entirely new to Stéphanie, and it’s better if it’s entirely fresh to you.’ ”

Re-imagining the love story

Rust and Bone began as a totally re-imagined departure from its source material. Audiard explains: “I’d read Craig Davidson’s short story collection Rust and Bone with tremendous pleasure. Davidson is a writer of the Crisis. He brutally depicts a modern world that is wobbling; his characters are on the margins, outside society. After A Prophet, a film about confinement, a world of men, without much light, (co-writer) Thomas Bidegain and I were drawn to follow up with a film that would be its opposite: a love story, bathed in light, that would show a woman with a man. Yet we also wanted to explore contemporary chaos and barbarism without addressing them head-on. The contrasts fascinated us—but there isn’t a love story in Craig Davidson’s collection, so we invented it.”

Before love in this story, though, comes pain. As Ali and Stéphanie bring each other back to life, they navigate a world of violence and scarred emotions. Audiard worked with his actors to portray the relationship with powerful resonance.

“Audiard is constantly looking for the life in the moment itself,” says Matthias Schoenaerts (pronounced shuh-nar). “He’s not about executing what he wrote, he’s constantly on the lookout for “how can life change what I wrote?” Ali is not always the most sympathetic guy; the audience isn’t going to identify with him straight away. But there’s something about his sincerity, his simplicity, that’s genuinely attractive. We rehearsed and improvised, trying out darker, rougher ways to play Ali. Finally, we struck on an almost childlike streak in Ali which made the character suddenly more real to us, more believable as someone Stéphanie could love. That juvenile energy breathed life into him. Otherwise he’s this social, self-aware character that knows what shit he’s in and starts being depressed about it, and we didn’t want that at all. Ali goes from being an emotional zero to surrendering to love. He also learns to love his child. Audiard has a way of making characters so profound and so multilayered. He’s truly an actor’s director, who works with the actors very collaboratively to bring out those shades.”

Cotillard concurs. “I’ve worked with amazing directors,” she says, “But the thing with Jacques is you feel the love that he has for his story and the characters—it’s so strong, it’s very, very inspiring. Audiard is a poet.”

Realism and its opposites

Audiard and cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine, who also shot A Prophet and The Beat That My Heart Skipped, evoke a harshly commercialized setting of urban strips, big-box retail, the anonymous disco, the touristy orca show—but they also make the audience feel the liberating sensation of sun and seawater on Stéphanie’s body, the physicality and adrenaline of sex and combat. Gritty social realism slides into dreamlike imagery, as Audiard describes: “We were obsessed with the idea that the strength of the images would render this painting of passions, extreme situations, extreme feelings. We wanted to find a brutal and contrasting aesthetic. We talked about neo-expressionism, Tod Browning’s Freaks, the films of Lon Chaney, the circus and fairground films of the Great Depression, in which the strangeness of the visuals sublimates the blackness of reality. We talked about monstrous tales. And about Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter, which begins with a father being arrested in front of his son because he has stolen in order to feed them. Are those films melodramas? Are they expressionistic? We don’t have a lexicon for that.” Like Fontaine, many key crew members—producers, editor, music composer, art director, casting, production designers— are longtime collaborators on Audiard’s films.

Physical duress

As actors, both Cotillard and Schoenaerts had to inhabit bodies under extreme physical duress. “I researched and I watched videos of amputees,” says Cotillard, “But I got more out of a direction Jacques gave me. He told me, “Sometimes part of her refuses the situation so sometimes she will try to stand up and she will forget that she has no legs and she will fall.” You don’t see that onscreen but it made me feel the part.” Technically, the amputations are achieved by CGI, but to Cotillard, “That’s the least interesting part, though the technical people did amazing work. What matters is the flesh, bones, sexual, violent physicality.”

Schoenaerts trained intensively for his role as a kickboxing combatant, but not to achieve the conventional hero’s ripped physique: “I worked out every day, had to get my weight back up after Bullhead. Jacques had a very specific idea of the physique that Ali should have—he should be strong but not trained. Here’s a guy who has been boxing for years but then dropped out and started gaining weight, he has a belly. We didn’t want him to look too fit or well trained, we wanted him to look a little bit unhealthy. He’s a guy who doesn’t have the means to be eating right and training properly and his appearance should make that clear.”

About his character’s bare-fisted fighting, Schoenaerts says: “When you have nothing what is there left to sell? There’s your body, so he fights. And somehow he needs the pain. The fights are painful but they’re very sensory. He’s unable to feel his emotional level, but the fights bring it to life, that’s where he feels he has a body. When he hits or gets hit he feels it, there’s something happening. And then Stephanie just breaks his heart open.”

In bed

The sexual chemistry between Ali and Stéphanie transcends her disability. Says Audiard, “Personally, I perceived the erotic nature of the situation quite quickly. Let me explain: there are two problems facing fiction films, two areas where they come up short: violence leading to death, because you know that they’re not going to kill the actor; and sex, because you know that the sighs and pleasure are a sham – plus, it’s very awkward to film. For a long time I’ve pondered the problem of the representation of physical love. This story allows me to avoid the problem of representation of the sexual act. When Ali takes Stéphanie on his back, it’s all about sex. So when they’re in bed, I no longer have to linger on the faces, to believe the faces; I believe what the woman is revealing of herself, her infirmity, and it’s like she’s even more naked.”
As Schoenaerts says, “Of course I forgot her legs. Ali forgets, so I forgot.”

The princess and the fighter

“I can’t imagine who else could have played Stéphanie, just as I can’t imagine who else could have played Piaf in La Vie en rose,” says Audiard. “There’s a virile authority to her acting, and at the same time she exudes sexuality. She’s very seductive. There’s another reason: I’m not forgetting that she’s extremely famous. And that fame adds to the fiction. When her legs are amputated, it’s a cinematic convention: we know it’s a famous actress playing a role. She’s a princess, a princess who falls from on high.”

Audiard continues: “When I saw Bullhead, I immediately wanted to meet Matthias. We had very little time to prep. Marion focused her work on her handicap and the killer whales, and Mathias on the fights. For her, the arc was difficult but clear: she is someone on the path to recovery. With Mathias, we had to work more on his character: in the script, Ali was coarser. He couldn’t be too dim, he had to attract Stéphanie’s gaze, there had to be a basis for seduction and then love.”

The seemingly positive wrap-up—Ali’s boxing triumph, Sam and Stéphanie at his side—is mitigated by the voice-over which tells of the enduring pain in Ali’s shattered hands. As Schoenaerts sees it, “We just watched a film for one and a half hours where we saw what these two human beings are and what they went through. They’re still going to have to deal with that—it’s not over. They still have pain, they still have to bring up the kid, she still has to deal with her handicap. But they can share it and be a support to one another, so it’s a good ending but I wouldn’t necessarily call it a classical happy ending.”

Audiard wonders, “What would she have become if she hadn’t had that accident? She probably would have remained the somewhat arrogant princess that she was, unable to truly love someone. ‘Thanks’ to her infirmity, and because Ali never looks at her with pity or compassion, she allows herself to let go and experiences something she would otherwise never have known.”

For Cotillard, her character’s loss is a revelation. “When there’s nothing left, it’s just you, your soul, and what’s deep inside of you. Will you be able to face it or will you be too afraid to face it? We see the encounter of two naked souls who surrender to this nudity. That’s the beauty of this story and these people.”

Best known to U.S. filmgoers for his collaboration with Jacques Audiard on the screenplays for Audiard’s Rust and Bone (2012) and A Prophet (2009), Thomas Bidegain also collaborated on the screenplays for Where Do We Go Now? (2011) directed by Nadine Labaki, and Our Children (2012) directed by Joachim Lafosse.

STEPHANE FONTAINE (Cinematographer)

Prior to their collaboration on Rust and Bone, Stéphane Fontaine worked with director Jacques Audiard on A Prophet (2009) and The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005). He has photographed many feature films in Europe and the U.S., including Talk to Me (2007), The Next Three Days (2010), Goodbye First Love (2011), and the forthcoming Jimmy Picard (2013).

JULIETTE WELFING (Editor)

Prior to their collaboration on Rust and Bone, Juliette Welfing worked with director Jacques Audiard on A Prophet (2009), The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005), Read My Lips (2001) and A Self-Made Hero (1996). She has edited many feature films in Europe and the U.S., including The Hunger Games (2012), The Big Picture (2010), A Simple Heart (2008), and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007).

ALEXANDRE DESPLAT (Composer, Original Music)

Alexandre Desplat has composed music for 139 feature films in Europe and the U.S., including, in addition to Rust and Bone, Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet (2009), The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005), Read My Lips (2001) A Self-Made Hero (1996), and See How They Fall (1994). Among his most recent musical scores for other filmmakers are: Moonrise Kingdon (2012), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011), Carnage (2011), The Idea of March (2011), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Parts I and II), The Tree of Life (2011) and The King’s Speech (2010).

"VIRTUALLY EVERY MOMENT OF THE FILM IS VISUALLY BEAUTIFUL AND POETIC."
- Scott Feinberg, HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

"GRADE A.
MATTHIAS SCHOENAERTS AND MARION COTILLARD SIMPLY RADIATE OFF THE SCREEN.
COTILLARD'S PERFORMANCE IN THIS FILM IS ONE SCENE AFTER ANOTHER OF SHEER PERFECTION.
JACQUES AUDIARD IS A TRUE MASTER AT WORK."
- Brad Brevet, ROPE OF SILICON

Academy Award winner Marion Cotillard was seen this summer in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises and Guillaume Canet’s Little White Lies. She will be seen next in the U.S. in her portrayal of a double amputee in Jacques Audiard’s Rust and Bone.
She recently completed lensing Guillaume Canet's Blood Ties opposite Clive Owen, Billy Crudup, Mila Kunis, Zoe Saldana, and her Rust and Bone costar Matthias Schoenaerts. Set in 1970s Brooklyn, the film explores organized crime and the relationship between two brothers on either side of the law. Before that, she wrapped production starring in the Untitled James Gray Project, opposite Joaquin Phoenix and Jeremy Renner. The film, co-written and directed by James Gray, is a story about an innocent immigrant woman (Cotillard) in search of the American dream, who sails to Ellis Island in the early twentieth century.

In 2008, Cotillard became the second French actress to ever win an Oscar®, and the first to win an acting award for a performance in the French language. The praise came for her riveting portrayal of legendary French chanteuse, Edith Piaf, in the film La Vie En Rose. Of her performance, New York Times film critic Stephen Holden wrote, Cotillard gives “the most astonishing immersion of one performer into the body and soul of another I've ever encountered in film.” For her role, Cotillard also received a Best Actress BAFTA, Golden Globe and César Award as well as a Screen Actors Guild and Critics Choice Award nomination. In addition, she was named Best Actress by critics organizations worldwide, including the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the London Film Critics Circle.

Cotillard's credits include the successful French Taxi film series, written by Luc Besson; Yann Samuell's Love Me If You Dare; and Tim Burton's Big Fish. She garnered her first Cesar Award for Best Supporting Actress, for her performance in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's A Very Long Engagement. Following that, she went on to star in Ridley Scott's A Good Year; Michael Mann's Public Enemies and Rob Marshall's Nine, the screen adaptation of the hit musical. Her performance in the film brought her Golden Globe and Critics' Choice Award nominations, and she also shared in a SAG Award® nomination for Outstanding Motion Picture Cast Performance. Additional credits include Chris Nolan's Inception, Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, which garnered Oscar®, Golden Globe and SAG Award® Best Motion Picture Nominations, as well as Steven Soderbergh's Contagion.

In 2010, Cotillard was named a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters, for her contribution to the enrichment of French culture. Born in Paris, she studied drama at Conservatoire d'Art Dramatique in Orléans.

Selected Filmography

2012 ~ RUST AND BONE by Jacques Audiard

2012 ~ LITTLE WHITE LIES by Guillaume Canet

2012 ~ THE DARK KNIGHT RISES by Christopher Nolan

2011 ~ CONTAGION by Steven Soderbergh

2011 ~ MIDNIGHT IN PARIS by Woody Allen

2010 ~ INCEPTION by Christopher Nolan

2010 ~ NINE by Rob Marshall

2009 ~ PUBLIC ENEMIES by Michael Mann

2007 ~ LA VIE EN ROSE by Olivier DahanOscar for Best Actress, César for Best Actress, Golden Globe for Best Actress, BAFTA for Best Actress

2006 ~ BURNT OUT by Fabienne Godet

2006 ~ A GOOD YEAR by Ridley Scott

2006 ~ YOU AND ME by Julie Lopes-Curval

2005 ~ MARY by Abel Ferrara

2005 ~ LOVE IS IN THE AIR by Rémi Bezançon

2004 ~ A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT by Jean-Pierre JeunetCésar for Best Supporting Actress

He started to act on stage when he was a child playing opposite his father Julien Schoenaerts in The Little Prince. And at 15, he made his screen debut in the Oscar-nominated Daens (Stijn Coninx).

In 2002, after finishing the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in Antwerp, he has performed in a number of stage productions and has starred also a number of award-winning shorts and feature movies such as Any Way The Wind Blows (Tom Barman) and My Queen Karo (Dorothée Van Den Berghe).

His acclaimed lead performance in director Michael Roskam’s Bullhead (Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Film, 2012) brought him international renown. For that performance, he won the FIPRESCI Award for Best Actor at Palm Springs International Film Festival, the Award of Best Actor at Austin Fantasctic Fest and The Acting Award Prize at the AFI, among others.

In addition to his starring role in Rust and Bone, 2012 saw Schoenaerts contributing lead performances to two American thrillers: Loft, directed by Eric Van Looy, and Blood Ties, directed by Guillaume Canet (to be released in 2013).

Jacques Audiard, born April 30, 1952, is the son of the screenwriter and director Michel Audiard. He began his career in film not as a director or screenwriter, but as an editor. It wasn’t until 1980 that he began collaborating on scripts for directors like Georges Lautner (The Professional), Denys Granier-Deferre (Reveillon With Bobsled), Claude Miller (Mortal Hike), Jérôme Boivin (Baxter), Elisabeth Rappeneau (Frequency Murder) or Ariel Zeitoun (Saxo). As eclectic as these films may seem, they all have a commonality: a black atmosphere, a caustic and shifted humor, and a somewhat hopeless vision of the human condition. Audiard maintained this sort of dark vein when directing his first film in 1994, See How They Fall, starring Mathieu Kassovitz and Jean-Louis Trintignant. His third film, Read My Lips, received 10 nominations and won 8 Cesar Awards in 2001. He followed that up with The Beat That My Heart Skipped, in 2005. Next was A Prophet (Un Prophète), which debuted at Cannes in 2009. Rust and Bone was in official competition at Cannes in 2012.

FILMOGRAPHY

RUST AND BONE

2012/director, co-writer, producer

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL, 2012
Official competition

A PROPHET

2009/director, co-writer

CANNES FILM FESTIVAL, 2009Grand Prix Prize

ACADEMY AWARDS, 2010
Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film

GOLDEN GLOBE, 2010
Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film

BAFTA AWARDS, 2010Best Film Not In The English Language

LONDON CRITICS CIRCLE FILM AWARDS, 2010Film of the Year
Nominations for Foreign Language Film of the Year, Director of the Year, Actor of the Year, Screenwriter of the Year

CÉSAR AWARDS, 2010Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Most Promising Actor, Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Production Design
Nominations for Best Costume Design, Best Music Written for a Film Best Sound, Most Promising Actor

EUROPEAN FILM AWARDS, 2009Prix d’Excellence, Best Actor
Nominations for Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenwriter, Best Cinematographer

AMANDA AWARDS, NORWAY, 2010
Nomination for Best Foreign Feature Film

AUSTIN FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION, 2010Best Foreign Language Film
Nomination for Best Film

BODIL AWARDS, 2011
Nomination for Best Non-American Film

BRITISH INDEPENDENT FILM AWARDS, 2010Best Foreign Film

BROTHERS MANAKI INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, 2009Bronze Camera 300 Award for Best Cinematography

CENTRAL OHIO FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION
Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film

CHICAGO FILM CRITICS ASSOCIATION AWARDBest Foreign Language Film
Nominated for Most Promising Performer

DAVID DI DONATELLO AWARDS, 2010
Nomination for Best European Film

FILM CRITICS CIRCLE OF AUSTRALIA AWARDS, 2011
Nomination for Best Foreign Language Film

FOTOGRAMAS DE PLATA, 2011Best Foreign Film

FRENCH SYNDICATE OF CINEMA CRITICSBest Film

GOYA AWARDS, 2011
Nomination for Best European Film

INDEPENDENT SPIRIT AWARDS, 2010
Nomination for Best Foreign Film

IRISH FILM AND TELEVISION AWARDS, 2011
Nominations for Best International Film, Best International Actor

ITALIAN NAT’L SYNDICATE OF FILM JOURNALISTS, 2010
Nomination for Super Ribbon Award for Best European Director

LAS VEGAS FILM CRITICS SOCIETY AWARD, 2010
Nomination for Sierra Award for Best Foreign Film